Agile
Are Daily Stand-ups Necessary?
Daily stand-ups are a pretty common practice in the Agile world. If you’re not familiar with this practice, basically the entire team will get together once a day (usually in the morning) and have a quick meeting. Everyone usually remains standing for the meeting to emphasize that this meeting should be kept short.
In the Defence of Pair Programming
A few weeks ago I read an interesting article challenging the practice of Pair Programming. I’ve written about Pair Programming before and how I think it’s pretty awesome.
How effective are your estimations?
One of the things I’ve been pondering recently is around estimations. If you’re not familiar with estimations – it’s a step in the agile process, before development starts, where a group of developers will discuss a story and assign a point value to the card. This point value is meaningless by itself, but is very useful when comparing different stories. For example, a 4-point story should – on average – take twice as long as a 2-point story.
Book Review: User Stories Applied
TLDR Version: User Stories Applied is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the ideas behind user stories. The book has very good examples and guidelines on writing better user stories and integrating them into your development process.
Design vs User Experience
One of the topics that keeps popping up around the office is that of design vs user experience. At first glance you might consider them to be the same issue – both involve presenting data and actions to the user in a way that they find appealing and easy to use. While they address the same issue, I think that these practices do so with a similar, yet different, goal in mind. The best differentiation might be to say that design is focusing on making the application visually appealing while user experience focuses on making the application easy to use.
Good User Stories
Writing good user stories is a real art. I have no doubt that I still have a lot to learn in this regard, but from my limited experience I’ve definitely seen some user stories which are very good and some which are very bad.
Book Review: The Mythical Man-Month
As part of my employment at ThoughtWorks I am afforded a book allowance. This prompted me to look around and figure out which books I really should have read by now. One name which came up quite a few times and which has often been mentioned to me is The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.
Why I like Pair Programming
Pair programming is easily the most controversial agile development practice and in my experience the most frequently avoided. It makes some people pretty uncomfortable.